


Phantom Limb

by Nekositting



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Creepy, Don't ask me what this is because I wouldn't be able to tell you tbh, F/M, Not Beta Read, Psychological Horror, Psychotic break, Supernatural Elements, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 01:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13224981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nekositting/pseuds/Nekositting
Summary: It hadn’t lingered on her mind for longer than a moment before she had been swept away by a new passage in her text book. Her mind had wrangled the unease into submission, and she returned to the focus of all her hard work.That had been her first mistake.





	Phantom Limb

**Author's Note:**

> This is my contribution to Tomione Day. 
> 
> If this leaves you with lingering questions, trust me, I have many myself. I want to know what the hell I was thinking when I wrote this.
> 
> Please leave comments or kudos if you liked.

The first time she heard the voice, she hadn’t given it much thought. She’d come up with several different excuses, attributed it to the long hours of studying and poorly brewed coffee.

It had felt like a dream—the voice so soft that it could have been anything, really. It could have been the purr of her cat, pawing at her arm for food. It could have been the hiss of her tea kettle, alerting her that the water had boiled.

The voice had been innocuous. Perfectly innocent and utterly forgettable.

She worked hard hours, rarely slept in between classes and her tough job at the office. It was a hard life, but one that she would never give up. Her education was more valuable than all the lost sleep, than all the time she spent away from her parents back in Australia. 

It had been  _everything._

She wanted a future. She wanted to study the mind, burrow deep into one’s psyche for the kernels of truth lying inside. People had always fascinated her, even when the worst aspects of themselves drowned out the good. 

Her interest was what had brought her to America. It was what had her abandoning her life with her parents in Australia; her education completely paid for in America so long as she maintained her perfect scores and published papers on her groundbreaking research.

So the voice, as alarming as it should have been, had been nothing more than a blip in her relatively hectic life. It had been inconsequential. And even if she had addressed it then, the voice had disappeared as quickly as it had come.

No trace, no evidence that it had even been real.

It had been unimportant; barely registered when her mind had been so preoccupied with more pressing matters. 

It hadn’t lingered on her mind for longer than a moment before she had been swept away by a new passage in her text book. Her mind had wrangled the unease into submission, and she returned to the focus of all her hard work.

That had been her first mistake.

* * *

 

The second time the voice had come, she had been seated in her tub, a novel in hand. The suds around her had kept the clear water murky and mysterious; her luminous skin masked by the soap and bath bomb she had used that evening.

The room had smelled intensely of eucalyptus and lavender. Her two favorite scents, not because she genuinely liked them, but because they helped take the edge of final exams from her mind. It had soothed her tired muscles, chased away the ache in the soles of her feet from walking from her apartment to the university ten blocks away.

It had been a moment where her guard had been lowered, her attention entirely engrossed by her novel.

So when the voice came, even when it had been soft, gentle; even when the syllables bled into her mind, crept into her thoughts without so much as a warning; the sound more powerful than the words on the pages she tried to absorb, she had reacted.

She had jumped in the water when it had come, her hands nearly dropping her tattered paperback with her surprise. She’d looked in every direction, sought out the source of where the voice could have possible come, but she had never found it. 

The voice had come as quickly as it had left. The only evidence that it had happened at all, the gooseflesh that had prickled her skin and the droplets of water on the forty-third page of her novel.

She had dismissed the event just as quickly as the last. 

But she never quite managed to get comfortable in her tub after that.

* * *

 

When the third time came, Hermione’s reaction had been instant.

She jolted, suddenly no longer tired enough to ooze into the comforting warmth of her sheets and soft bed.

It had come unbidden. As it always had. 

Except this time, the words had been clearer than they had ever been before. It had slid across her psyche, settled deep into the comforting lull of slumber and awareness.

_Let me in, Hermione..._

It was like running water. The droplets cascading down her cheeks, her chest, and her legs. It was warm, so hot and unexpected that she wondered idly if she’d left her tea kettle on and, in her carelessness, the kettle had exploded from the pressure, the boiling liquid splattering her with its intensity.

Even if such a thing was impossible. She had been on her bed, and her kitchen was on the other side of her apartment...

It had been a silly thought. One that should have alerted her to the wrongness of the whole affair. 

But rather than flee, rather than suspect something more insidious, she had waved this event away as well.

And why shouldn’t she have? What reason at that time did she have to suspect it?

She hadn’t understood what the words meant. She had been certain that she had fallen asleep, that her mind had been playing tricks on her as it often did after two consecutive all-nighters.

The words had sounded real, the tenor of that deep voice so clear that there was no mistaking just what it had said. Where it had come from, she hadn’t known then. 

Now, she only wished that she had addressed it before it had turned into a nightmare.

* * *

 

The fourth time she had heard the voice, everything came apart at the seams.

She had been sitting idly at her desk, the end of her pen between her lips as she tried to come up with the perfect answer for her physics with calculus homework.

The sound of her name, whispered into her ear, had shaken her from her thoughts. It had bled through the algorithms, the calculations she had followed to arrive to her answer.

And like a cancerous disease, it had eaten away at her. Rotted her from the inside, the voice thoroughly ripping her away from her studies. 

She had been certain the voice would fade then, as it had the previous times before. She had fully expected it, in fact. But the voice, rather than fade into the dull thrum of her laptop as it often did, had grown  _worse_.

Suddenly, rather than that singular voice speaking into her ear, there was a breath on her neck. Like tendrils of hair that curled around the nape of her neck, soft and tender. 

The breath had traveled from the nape of her neck, down to the carotid artery at the side of her throat, pulsing wildly with distress. 

It had lingered there, like a finger on flushed skin. Each second where it remained, like the loving caress of a lover waiting for their partner to turn and meet their touches with one of their own.

The situation had been anything but.

It had made her stomach drop with dread. It had frozen her veins, made her toes curl with fear because she lived alone. She didn’t have roommates. Unless one counted her pet, Crookshanks, into that equation. There shouldn’t have been warmth where there had only been cold air.

 _Let me in, Hermione..._  

The voice had whispered those words into her neck, as if a real person had been standing behind where she reclined against her desk chair. Her fingers had curled into fists, her teeth had caught her bottom lip in a tight vice, and she had tried her best to not make a sound.

If she had acknowledged it, then it would have become real. This ghost, this  _thing_ , would somehow become emboldened by her reactions. 

So she had done what she had done all the times before. She had ignored it even when her instincts screamed for her to leave. All of them had shouted for her to get up and leave, but hesitation left her rooted in place.

She couldn’t leave. 

Not when she couldn’t afford to move elsewhere. Not when she was a long way from home and her final exams were two weeks away.

She had been terrified, the prospect of a psychiatric break like acid eroding the hard lines of her bones. It had atrophied her because  _no_ , she wasn’t something that happened to her. 

And how wrong she had been. How terrified she was at that time by the revelation that her mind had not been her own. It had split her at the seams, cut her down with a swiftness that couldn’t be repelled.

A something she hadn’t been able to banish, to wrangle even when she had wished that she could. 

It wasn’t normal to hear voices in one’s own head. It wasn’t  _normal_ to feel a breath on her neck when there was no one there.

One thing was to study the mind, but to experience of the likes she had experienced, had been another thing entirely. 

It had made her question her sanity, made her wonder if she, since she had come to America, had been dangling near the edge of this precipice from the very beginning. 

* * *

 

On fifth day, the voice was all she would hear.

It was all that she dreamed, it was all that she thought while struggling to meet her deadlines.

The voice would whisper to her to pursue different ideas. It would twist her theories into pretzels, force her down a long-winded path that she had no way of getting out of.

She tried to ignore it at first, just as she always had. She tried to forget what the touch along the nape of her neck felt like, driven to madness when the touches became more solid.  _More real._

Nothing could explain it. 

The touches were everywhere and nowhere. They straddled the nudges of her spine, they curled around the back of her neck, slid between the joints of her elbows, and along the curves of her knees. 

It was endless, and Hermione wanted to scream herself hoarse. To make it stop because it was impossible to focus when heat lapped at her flesh, dribbled down her arms like hot water from her bath.

And then, she erred. 

She had committed her second and final mistake. 

“I-I don’t know who you are, what this  _is_ , but you will stop this now.”

Hermione had acknowledged it.

* * *

 

If she had known that the monster would have come wearing the face of a human man, she never would have let herself fall the way she had. She never would have brushed it aside, never would have fallen asleep knowing that there was a presence just hiding beyond her periphery.

She would have fought him tooth and nail. She would have packed her bags and left. It wouldn’t have saved her indefinitely, she doubted she could escape his shadow for long.

But it would have been better than the life she lived now. 

If one could even call this a life. 

“Hermione...”

The voice came from a short distance behind her, and it took everything within her not to flinch. He had already invaded every corner of her life, ingrained himself into every crack and crevice of her soul.

There was nothing his presence hadn’t stained—hadn’t branded with his name. Everything reminded her of him. Even the air she breathed, the clothes she wore, was filled with him.

There was nothing of her left. He had taken it all from her.

“ _Sweetheart_...” 

She bristled at the endearment, but did not move. She refused to. It was his aim, his  _goal_.

What fun is a prisoner if he couldn’t get her to react?

"How long do you plan to ignore me? It will not change the fact that you have  _lost_.”

She wanted to tell him to fuck off. To shove his smug tone so far up his arse that he’d be tasting it for weeks. 

She didn’t, even when everything within her wanted to. It would be a mistake, she knew this. It would simply repeat the same set of events all over again—the memory of her  _stupidity_ , of her ignorance one that she could barely stand.

A short pause followed before he spoke again, tone silky. The voice so much closer than it had been before—perhaps, a couple centimeters away if she had to guess.

“Your peers know nothing...can hardly tell the difference between who you were and who you are now. They don’t  _see_ you as I do.”

Hermione bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, the taste of iron hot and heavy on her tongue. She didn’t want to listen anymore. It was the same conversation, the same stupid struggle between keeping herself from responding and showing him just how much she despised him.

But he  _lived_ for this. His pathetic existence thrived off the misery of others, latched onto one’s loneliness and refused to let go. It was how he had found her...how he had snuck into her life without her knowing he was there...waiting. 

“Your are nothing to them...but not to me, dearest Hermione...”

It was a lie. A honeyed poison that intoxicated its victims before snuffing their lives out. It was how he worked. It was the name of the game.

He prayed off the weakness of others...learned all that he could about his victims before squeezing his hands around their necks and strangling what little air they managed to drink through their throats.

It was a slow descent, but once he was in, there would be no coming out of it alive.

“No, you’re more than a vessel...”

Hermione trembled when a warm hand clasped around her shoulders, when his lips came so close to her ear that his lips brushed against the shell.

“And that’s what you’re afraid of...not this mental prison you’ve crafted for yourself in the hopes of keeping me out.”

She wanted to deny it, and she almost did. Her lips had parted, but she caught herself right before she did. 

 _Don’t let him get under your skin...don’t let him take more than he already has_.

“You’re afraid of how  _good_ it feels to have me burrowed in your bones...to feel my power...my mind linked to your own.”

He squeezed her tightly, blunt nails digging into the thin fabric of her night shirt—the very same one she had worn when he had first possessed her. 

The memories of that day were hazy at best...her screams and his laughter the only thing that she recalled with vivid clarity. 

She wished she didn’t remember even that small fact. That instead of the insidious sound of his voice echoing in her head that all she had was silence. That it was black, unknowable and lost. 

Just as she was now, counting the days before her body finally breathed its last breath.

The days couldn’t come faster.

“You’re terrified of yourself...of what this could mean for you should you acknowledge my existence, just as you had once before...”

He leaned in until his cheek was pressed against her own, and Hermione could not stop herself from clenching her hands into fists, nails cutting into her palms.

_Don’t listen, don’t listen, don’t listen, don’t—_

_“Let me in_...” he breathed, and Hermione shuddered, unable to quell the tremors that racked through her. She felt his voice through the very marrow of her bones, how another hand—the one that he had not pressed against her shoulder—played with a lock of her curly hair.

It was an intimacy that shouldn’t have existed between them, but god, there was no escaping it. No running from the press of his hands upon her skin, of his voice in her head, whispering ceaselessly to give in, to submit.

It was the same, every time. The parasite couldn’t get enough of her...didn’t want to let her go even after he had drained her to the very last drop. There was nothing left for him to take, nothing more that she had to offer. 

So  _why_ he lingered,  _why_  he didn’t just let her  _die_ , she didn’t understand. Couldn’t, for all the thought she’d given this enigma.

Then, his nose suddenly nudged her throat. Followed by a moist tongue that licked against her skin, as if tasting her for the very first time.

Hermione’s self-control splintered.

“No!” She spat, stomach in knots when the hand gripping her shoulder twisted her around. She had no time to fight it, no way to stop it when struggling against him was like going against a hurricane.

Hermione stopped breathing.

Tom towered above her, like an ominous shadow. His hair was just as dark as she remembered, his skin just as pale, his features just as beautiful. He was like a fallen angel, perhaps, even Lucifer himself for all the power he possessed.

But that had not been what made her heart stop, not what made her skin crawl, and her breath catch.

Tom had always been terrifying, had always been _more_ than a monster that had stripped her of her agency, of her _identity_.

It was the smile that lit up his face like dazzling lights in endless darkness. It was the sharp edge of his teeth, the sly gleam in his gaze.

He pressed a soft touch to her cheek, and Hermione didn’t notice it all, too terrified of what his expression could mean to spare the innocuous gesture a thought. Her dread was like an anchor in the pit of her stomach, the rusted metal poking inside her ribcage from the panic.

“Oh sweetheart, you already _have_ …”


End file.
